Practically all businesses need money at one point or another. Many financing options exist, but two popular choices are to open a line of credit or get a credit card. Deciding upon the best option may be difficult since credit cards and lines of credit work in a similar way — both allow you to access money when you need it and then you make payments on a predetermined schedule. If you don’t know whether to use a line of credit or a credit card for finances, the scenarios below can help you decide.

What Do You Do If You Have a Difficult Time Getting Approved for a Loan?

Credit cards typically have higher interest rates than lines of credit, but getting approved for a credit card is much easier. All you need is proof of income to get a credit card. A line of credit requires proof of income and collateral. If you’ve previously been declined for a loan, a credit card can be your best option, giving you a better chance of getting approval to borrow the money you need.

What Do You Do If You Need to Get Money Fast?

Getting a credit card is easier and faster than getting a line of credit. Many banks will instantly approve you for a credit card and give you a number to use until your official card arrives in the mail. You could potentially use a credit card the same day you apply for one. If you need money quickly, a credit card is the best option. However, you’ll need to keep in mind that you’ll have to deal with higher interest rates than if you requested a line of credit.

What Do You Do If You Need to Borrow a Large Sum of Money?

Credit cards allow you to receive money quickly, and you can get approved to receive one without much hassle. However, you can usually get approved to borrow more money with a line of credit. If you need more than a few thousand dollars, a line of credit is your best option.

You can turn to almost any bank for a small business line of credit, but working with a company that specializes in this type of credit is better. For example, Kabbage offers unsecured small business lines of credit at competitive interest rates. Additionally, this online lender could qualify you for a line of credit up to $150,000.

What Do You Do If You Only Need a Loan for a Short Time Frame?

In general, getting a line of credit is better than a credit card because lines of credit have lower interest rates. This reality doesn’t matter much if you plan to have the loan only for a short time frame. If you pay off your credit card the same month that you use it, sometimes you can avoid interest entirely.

Never apply for a line of credit or a credit card without a plan for how you will pay back the money. Always consider the terms of the loan and choose the best option for your business. If you still don’t know what to do, talk to a business financial expert.

Working capital is something every business needs in order to maintain growth and remain profitable. When a company’s cash flow starts to become unreliable however, they are forced to go to great lengths to reach a comfortable margin for operating, at prices that are difficult to justify. Most commonly, they apply for a bank loan but even if they should be approved, there are high interest rates to contend with. Eventually, some enterprises find that financing their business through loans does them more harm than good, and ends up costing more in the long term. There are ways to run a lucrative business and save money by avoiding money borrowing altogether, so long as there is consistent work. Invoice factoring helps you meet all of your payroll, tax, raw material, and supply costs and helps you cover critical expenses in order to keep your business functioning in a number of key ways, without the hurdles that come with costly loans.

Improved cash flow

Instead of waiting for your customers to pay their outstanding invoices, freight factoring allows you to access immediate cash that you can use to achieve your business objectives instead of waiting 30, 60 or even 90 days to get paid on your outstanding invoices.

Freedom to seize new opportunities

Because cash flow is directly tied to your invoices, factoring allows a third-party company like Accutrac Capital to worry about collecting invoices on your behalf, while you take advantage of new opportunities for growth. Whether it’s new sales and marketing initiatives, new equipment for expansion, or the ability to secure new accounts, factoring frees up your time and labor to focus on growing your business.

A better alternative to bank loans

Many lenders and banks avoid lending to invoice-reliant companies, and often place unrealistic hurdles between you and the money you need to operate. Freight bill factoring offers you the ability to maintain working capital for your business while a third party takes care of the outstanding invoices you are owed. Relying on a factoring company for trucking industry needs is now a commonplace practice, and makes up part of many businesses’ financing strategies.

Additionally, factoring companies offer discounted rates on fuel and currency exchange for clients who take on jobs across the border. They even offer equipment financing for those who wants to grow their fleets but who do not have sufficient enough collateral to be approved by the bank. Partnering with a factoring company allows businesses, and especially start ups, to create positive cash flow when first getting themselves off the ground. They also provide funding for clients where they would not otherwise be eligible, as qualification is based on the credit worthiness of the client’s customers.

The best way to improve cash flow is to choose invoice financing or factoring as an alternative to a commercial line of credit. Paying a small percentage to have outstanding invoices taken care of is worth the opportunities that acquiring your sums upfront can give you. Finally, it alleviates the frustration of dealing with tardy customers, or waiting to get paid (or paying your workers!) and having that be out of your control.

Being a business owner is kind of like being a fitness enthusiast, in the sense that you’re constantly focused on getting stronger. For example, you want to strengthen relationships with your customers, strengthen your brand, strengthen your reputation, and strengthen employee engagement. Indeed, even if your idea of a nutritious lunch is eating a donut (hint: please stop doing that to yourself), at least in terms of business health, you’re all about getting stronger and stronger. And that brings us to your credit score.

Strengthening your business credit score also needs to be on your priority list — especially if you want to negotiate better terms with suppliers, or get approved for business capital loans or lines of credit. With this in mind, here are three effective ways to pump up your business credit score muscles:

1. Get a DUNS Number

A DUNS number is a 9-digit identifier from Dun and Bradstreet (D&B). You can use it to establish your credit file, which is what prospective lenders and suppliers will check (among other things) to get a sense of your credit history and overall credit worthiness. And if you’re wondering how much a DUNS number costs, don’t worry: it’s free.

2. Tell Suppliers and Vendors to Report You to Credit Bureaus

Don’t assume that your roster of suppliers and vendors are reporting your excellent credit behavior (i.e. pays on time, pays in full, etc.) to credit bureaus. While this is a best practice, let’s face it: suppliers and vendors are as busy as you are, and this is just the kind of task that slips through the cracks. As such, be proactive and remind these partners to extol your virtues with the credit bureaus.

3. Keep Personal and Business Purchases Separate

Sometimes, new business owners – more out of practicality than strategy – use the same accounts or credit cards for personal and business expenses. If you’re among them, then in the very near future put a financial wall between these two parts of your life. That way, when lenders and suppliers ask your bank statements to check or verify your business’s cash flow numbers, you can do so rapidly, clearly and professionally.

The Bottom Line

Just like building strong muscles, building strong business credit doesn’t happen overnight. But if you do the right things the right way, before you know it you’ll be flexing your credit muscles with pride – and lifting your small business onwards and upwards.

As a business owner, you’re always looking for ways to increase your bottom line and invest in your business, and boost the amount of business you’re getting by way of marketing and word-of-mouth. If something is relevant to furthering either (or both), it’s of interest.

That something could be video. We already know that using video in advertising and marketing is crucial to building a visual brand identity in your audience – you want your clients to be able to recognize you via all of the senses, most especially sound and sight. Diode Digital found that video is up to 600% more effective, and because of that, video is the basic standard for marketing today – but you can take a step further to wow your competitors, and bring your service to even more potential customers. Live broadcasted video.

By supplementing, or replacing many of your marketing or basic business functions with live video streaming and broadcasts, you can both reduce cost for your business in big, big ways, and build a larger client base in a more effective manner. Here’s why:

Save Money on Travel Costs

The first thing you save money on when you supplement your seminars and events with live broadcasting is travel money, both on your end and on your client’s end. If you provide a coaching or consulting service, then broadcasting video to your clients is the absolute perfect way to get a larger attendance rate and save extreme expenses.

Imagine sitting on a beach in Costa Rica, with a laptop on your lap, explaining the gist of your latest book and lecturing on one of the fundamental lessons of being a successful entrepreneur while hundreds of listeners are sitting on the other end of the screen, in suits and shirts, in offices and homes, getting the exact same knowledge as they would in a large-scale seminar only without having to pay as much.

Is it starting to come together for you?

Save Money on Location Expenses and Rent 

If you have any experience being in seminars, you know that it isn’t cheap. Especially when you’re hosting the seminar, or are playing a key role as a speaker and educator. If you’ve never done it, but are planning to, you’re even luckier.

By replacing the physical location of a conference hall with the virtual location of a live broadcast, you’re making the most of your time and money while not skimping on the quality of service you’re presenting to your clients. Yes, the package of your message matters – but you can make the venue of your video just as inspiring and entertaining as the inside of a stuffy convention hall, and seriously, who cares about doing a seminar on-stage when you could be explaining your latest product or talking about your newest project on a porch in Italy as the sun sets in the background?

If you’re building a formal image with your clients, then broadcasting is still a great solution. By having a broadcasted seminar in your own board room instead of a convention hall, you’re getting the added benefit of branding.

Bring Your Method to Customers in a More Detailed Manner 

Broadcast live video through streaming methods like BlueJeans, and you’ll know why it isn’t just about the video. Cloud-based streaming services are growing like crazy, with cloud adoption soaring these past few years, with RightScale noting that over 80% of respondents to their inquiry had adopted the cloud in some way. The cloud gives you more options for your calls, more bang for your buck – think file sharing, multimedia presentations, recorded video streaming within your live stream, and more capabilities for explaining the details of your lesson or product without having to rely on your voice, your hands, and a whiteboard marker.

People respond better to visual stimuli – that’s why video calling is so much more effective than simply calling over the phone. Over the last few years, video calling has soared according to the Pew Center, with statistics back in 2013 showing a tripling of smartphone video calling instances since 2011. Presenting catchy visual media during a broadcast, however, can help you take things up a notch. Prepare your presentation right, and you could be looking at the next big hit for your business.

Finally, Use the Benefits of Broadcasting Within Your Business

There’s more to broadcasting video than just doing it for the benefit of your clients – you can use it to talk to your employees and your business’ team, as well. If you’re an international company with several branches, or employees all over the world, then video streaming is the absolute best way to communicate with your team.

Broadcasting live video in high quality isn’t the future – it’s already here, and it’s growing fast. If you get involved early enough, you’ll bring a whole new business model to your clients – one that saves you money, and makes more at the same time.

Just because you’re a small business doesn’t mean that you can’t have a lot of the same advantages of big businesses. Even SMBs today can do business internationally, and that means using a lot of the same tools as a multinational. Learn why even small companies need video conferencing, and why you shouldn’t believe the myths.

Sticker Shock

The biggest shocker about videoconferencing is how much it doesn’t cost. Back in the earliest days of videoconferencing, the equipment was expensive, just the same way it was expensive in the mid-90s to buy a new computer. With most mobile phones and tablets having a better capacity than those early computers, why do you think the same doesn’t apply to videoconferencing? The technology has come a very long way from requiring its own server and a dedicated member of the IT department to operate it.

In fact, one of the advantages of Bluejeans videoconferencing is that you can even videoconference from your mobile phone or your tablet. No extra equipment is required, though if you are using videoconferencing frequently you may eventually wish to invest in better lighting, cameras, and sound equipment.

Another Sticker Shock

Do you have any idea how much meetings cost? Verizon white paper hard and soft costs of meetings. For instance, a five-person meeting lasting two hours with four people traveling to attend assigned an approximate cost of 3300 pounds. This includes over 53 hours for preparation and travel. A videoconference means that there are no travel expenses, and prep time is cut to roughly 16 ½ hours. The total cost to have a five-person videoconference comes out to just 1100 pounds.

Redefining Flexibility

Another advantage to using videoconferencing is the ability to have a truly flexible workforce. Whether at home, at the office, or even on a job site the ability to reach someone for a face-to-face conversation is priceless. A recent Gigaom study points out that 87 percent of off-site feel more connected when using videoconferencing, and that cloud-based apps great way engagement and productivity. In addition, cloud-based tools are often easier to use faces, and less expensive than traditional videoconferencing solutions. Off-site workers can join from their desktops, laptops, tablets, or even their smart phones. From the main office to a home office, to a café or airport waiting lounge, the conference can be wherever you are.

Re-engaging the Workforce

According to a Gallup poll, managers handle at least 70 percent of variances in employee engagement. A staggeringly low 13 percent of workers worldwide are engaged and involved in their workplaces and jobs. In the past 12 years, these numbers have made the most boring roller coaster in the world. Part of the problem can be the lack of consistency and absence of communication in which most employees operate. Great managers are consistent and communicate in a highly effective manner. The variation in all of these groups depends almost exclusively on how the workers are managed by their immediate superior and upper management.

By seeking out and giving employees collaborative tools, you’re giving them the chance to engage with each other as well as their immediate superior by getting everyone to work together on their assigned projects. It’s possible that you will see your staff shine, and may also discover if perhaps someone else light make a more effective and less of obstructionist manager. Great managers will create the correct environment for employees to feel trusted and respected, and rely less on office politics and manipulation to keep control of their workgroups.

Even When You’re Little, Think Big

One big mistake that any small business owner can make is not to plan for growth. While you don’t want to get too big of a head, you need to look ahead and reasonably decide how much growth will be ahead of you in the next five years. If you don’t plan to grow, will be like a plant in a too-small pot, so tangled up in your own roots that you can easily choke to death. By making use of inexpensive collaborative tools that are available without much startup cost, you can have much more flexibility than if you invested in heavy and expensive infrastructure that you will not need.

The beauty of cloud-based applications like videoconferencing is that they are far more scalable than the old model of off-the-shelf software and expensive hardware. By learning how to budget wisely you can get your small business on a healthy footing right out of the gate. You can have a custom fit, instead of a one size fits all that fits nobody, and does not fulfill your immediate business needs. These collaborative tools may well be the best thing that your workforce and balance sheet has ever seen.

Everyone likes saving money, and most people will do all they can to save as much as they can. As a business owner, you are probably interested in saving money wherever you can as well. And while cutting back on expenses and shortening hours may be one route you’ve thought about for saving money, you don’t need to do anything like that if you adopt a video conferencing system. Actually, you won’t have to change much of anything in your business’s day to day routine if you start using a video conferencing system. But, you may be wondering how a video conferencing system can help your business save some cash, well, it can do so in a number of different areas, some via cutting back on expenses, while others through increasing productivity.

Reduce Travel Needs

The most obvious and most significant change video conferencing can bring to your business is a huge reduction in travel needs. It costs a lot to go visit clients in another state, or even another country, and there are a lot of extra expenses tacked on to traveling besides things like gas or airfare. You need to deal with food, lodging, perhaps some rental vehicles, and so on. Adopting a video conferencing system can completely negate your requirements to travel anywhere as you can get in contact with clients, partners, other business branches, and anyone else you need to talk to that isn’t in the same building. Biz Tech emphasizes the fact that video conferencing not only allows you to stay in contact and share documents with anyone else in your company, no matter where they are, but that it also is a great method for saving time. Traveling somewhere for a meeting isn’t just costly, it also takes a great deal of time. No matter how fast planes become or how advanced maglev trains get, you’re always going to be dealing with time wasted in getting from A to B. With video conferencing, you no longer need to worry about all those wasted hours; you can meet with whoever you need to, discuss whatever you need to, and then get right back to work without any delay. Without video conferencing, that whole process could take days depending on the circumstances; with video conferencing, it’s a matter of hours, or even minutes.

Productivity and Teamwork

This benefit isn’t so much one that cuts back on expenses as it is increasing the amount of money your company can make. Adopting a video conferencing system like Blue Jeans for Business won’t directly increase your profits, but it can and will increase your employee’s productivity and foster better teamwork. Think about it for a moment, setting up even an internal meeting within your office requires all those who will be participating to stop what they’re doing and meet up with you in the conference room or other location. While the actual time spent walking there isn’t too much, with a video conferencing system set up, all participants can instantly join the meeting from their office right when it starts.

Being able to instantly being meetings from wherever you and the other participants are is a huge benefit. Alongside that is how it can help foster an increase in teamwork by keeping all your employees and any different departments in constant contact with each other. Additionally, Social Barrel discusses how many video conferencing systems have options for instant and direct sharing of files and other documents in real time. So you can send out memos and itineraries and anything else digitally during the meeting.

All of the money saved on travel and increase in productivity can help give your company a competitive advantage over your competitors. Inc. states that the constant communication and connection with clients can help foster closer ties and more loyalty. It also drastically cuts back on the time needed to deal with quality checks, revisions, and other changes. Projects that may have taken a week before might only take a day or a few hours with video conferencing.

Going Green

The environment and humanities impact on it has become more and more of a major subject in today’s world. Regardless of your personal stance on climate change, there are definite benefits to shifting your business towards the green side of things. Video conferencing, whether you use a provider that uses green power or not, is a fantastic way of making your business greener without really changing much in your operations. According to Tree Hugger, a report by the Carbon Disclosure Project found that video conferencing systems can cut back CO2 emissions from US and UK businesses by close to 5.5 million metric tons, as well as save upwards of $19 billion across the entire economy.

Getting in on that piece of savings pie may be fantastic, but video conferencing can also cut back on your paper usage, which can cut back on printing usage on costs and so on. Adopting a video conferencing system like Blue Jeans isn’t just a good way to make your business greener; it’s a great way to save your business some serious time, effort, and money.